TNC2009 in Málaga - tuesday 9/6-2009

Network engineer Jan Ferré from UNI-C eduroaming (is that a verb?) in the bus...

Even more eduroaming at the opening plenary

Introduced by Andrew Cormack, we start the day with a talk about...

...the response from us, the IT-people, to the climate change threat, ...

presented by at familiar face, Bill St Arnaud from CANARIE.

He tells us about the daunting challenges we face.

Paul Watson from Newcastle University talks about cloud computing for e-Science.

People at TNC: Ole Kjærgaard, technical director at UNI-C and Dan Mønster, CTO of
the Danish Research Network, Forskningsnettet.

An indispensable part of the conference organization is the Secretariat room, which
for the occasion is also called the "Control room".

Inside the room, I hope that the management of RedIRIS feel they are in control.

However, the reason for the name "Control room" is probably due to the placement of
the hub for the wireless network, that works excellent everywhere in the building.
You are even able to roam between access points. All thumbs up!

My session before lunch was on the hot topic of virtualization, starting with
another familiar face, Jean-Marc Uzé from Juniper

...with a presentation with a good balance between involvement in actual projects and
the obvious sales pitch for Junipers virtualization features and
abilities to embed user-created software.

More on network virtualization, by Radek Krzywania

The technical side of the FEDERICA project was presented by
Jiri Navratil from CESNET.

Although promising for router development and topology research people,
Jiri had to admit that as a direct service to end users, it was not clear
what benefits FEDERICA could offer. In a tecnology-driven context, however,
that is not necessarily a bad thing :))

Prople at TNC: Vasilis Maglaris from GRNET and Lajos Bálint from HUNGARNET.

A very important part of the conference is, of course, the lunch, where you get fed, ...

...perhaps in the company of colleagues (my own specimens from UNI-C)...

...meet old freinds (like Diego Lopez from RedIRIS and David Simonsen from
the Danish Identity Federation, WAYF.dk)...

...meet new freinds...

...and yet some people appear as if they have no freinds!

The explanation for this solitude being urgent matters that needed
attention, by this participant, Mr. Ralf Weller, from HTW Berlin.
Life is hard.

The breaks are also the rush hours of the exhibition,

...although lunch seems more appealing to start with.

The rush-hour is definitely over at the reception.

In the breaks people also relax in the courtyard in front of
the break-out sessions.

Back again after lunch, I find myself in a session of assorted goodies, called "Implications".

John Paschoud from London School of Economics, has a very entertaining talk
about a series of trials showing how you can use social engineering to make
people voluntarily tell their userids, passwords, credit card numbers etc.

Believe it of not, it works very well. He also tried giving candy bars to the audience
in exchange for bits of personal information. It turned out that we were more
resilient than freshmen at the university.

Impressive what you can achieve, if you as a student about these types of information and you are wearing a
red T-shirt with "IT Support" printed on it.

Next talk, by Andy Powell from Eduserv in the UK, was about his
experiences with Second Life as collaboration platform.6~

As you may guess from this figure, the talk was not based on many facts, besides his personal
experiences in Second Life.

Last in that session, we had Thomas Burger from Fraunhofer University, with a talk about
a development environment for services, ServLab.

The entrance to the Faculty of Law at the University of Malaga, where alle the sessions
take place.

The day's last session was about networks outside Europe,
introduced by John Dyer from TERENA.

Online participation from Malawi to Mexico. Impressive.

Not entirely without technical obstacles.

Among others, we had a very good talk by F.F. Tusubira from the UbuntuNet Alliance.

...showing that Africa is a big place that offers a lot of challenge for
the research network extension effort!

Last, from KTH in Sweden, Björn Pehrson takes us through some of the challenges
of network establishment in Africa.

Meeting people - still the most important activity!

Sightseeing in Malaga city: The roman theatre

My session ended slight behind schedule, so I had trouble catching up with the
organized guided city walk, and got astray. However, at the top of the castle,
I found a little museum...

which contained a historial model of the city.

Perhaps not the best example of city planning, as the arena seems a
bit squeezed by the
virtual iron curtain formed by the modern buildings.

Otherwise, central Malaga is a beautiful city.

Even the wildlife is beautiful.

A eucalyptus forest on the castle hill. Truly exotic for at a guy from the cold
north.

Catching up with the guided tour, ...

...just in time to head that Picasso was born somewhere in the building at the other side of the square

The city has a Picasso Museum, and almost everywhere, you may find commemorative
instriptions like: "Here, Picasso experienced an earch quake", "Here, the father of
Picasso worked", "Here picasso this and that", and yet he quit the city at the age
of 11.